New Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has selected his cabinet and it’s all going to come from his own party and self-styled “technocrats.”

It’s replete with bankers and career politicians who made their bones serving the purposes of the parasitic rich class which treated Greece as its personal playground and avoided billions in tax in the process, and won’t even have the merit of representing the ruling coalition.

The pseudo-socialist Pasok party and Democratic Left, which have allied with Mr Samaras’s New Democracy conservatives, have refused point blank to allow their MPs to join the cabinet, leaving themselves elbow room to distance themselves from the government that they supposedly support.

So, in cold hard fact, the governing coalition does not exist. The social democrats have merely stood to one side and given the bankers and the eurocrats a fig-leaf of respectability to cover their direct rule of the country through their stooges in New Democracy.

There will undoubtedly be some cosmetic concessions to the new government by the powers that be in Europe to give an appearance of progress in ameliorating the tragedy of the Greek people, but cosmetic is all that they will be.

Still on the near horizon are another €13 billion of cuts in the next year and more to follow, coupled with the further bailout that’s approaching and the long-drawn out struggle for eventual repayment of the bailout funds.

This illusory election will not avert the intensifying crisis that the speculators are forcing on Greece.

And, despite the hopes of the international bankers who are desperate to safeguard the billions that they hold in Greek debt, it’s unlikely to avert an eventual default and devaluation.

When Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood warned civil servants in Westminster that the government is just 25 per cent of the way through its austerity programme, he was speaking no less than the truth.

Sir Jeremy said that spending restraint could last “seven, eight, maybe 10 years,” and that should give all of us pause for reflection.

Because that 25 per cent has already given us 2.61 million unemployed, youth joblessness of a million-plus and a claimant count of 1.6 million.

Where another decade leaves us is anyone’s guess but, at the present rate of acceleration a Greek situation is by no means inconceivable.

Especially since Britain‘s major export market is the EU countries, which are less and less likely to be growing their imports as capitalism’s crisis hits them.

The economic and social catastrophe unfolding in Greece is bringing to the fore long-running geopolitical conflicts: here.

Paul Krugman | Welcome to the 1930s. Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.: “Martin Wolf is shrill (and rightly so). ‘Before now, I had never really understood how the 1930s could happen,’ the Financial Times columnist wrote … ‘Now I do. All one needs are fragile economies, a rigid monetary regime, intense debate over what must be done, widespread belief that suffering is good, myopic politicians, an inability to co-operate and failure to stay ahead of events'”: here.

Britain: Left Labour MP Ian Lavery condemned a government minister’s callous response to revelations that cruel benefit cuts are driving some people toward suicide today: here.

Human rights activists and MPs demanded an absolute prohibition on the use of plastic bullets today as Tory-driven austerity cuts threaten more disturbances in the months and years to come: here.